Amplitude Studios made a splash with its 4x fantasy game Endless Legend over a decade ago. Now the sequel is set to leave Early Access on Steam just a year after beginning its post-launch development journey. Players’ expectations have changed a lot in those ten years, something the French studio grappled with during the development of Endless Legend 2.
“Going back to 10, 15 years ago, people understood very well it was an unfinished game,” CEO Romain de Waubert de Genlis, one of Amplitude’s cofounders, told Rock Paper Shotgun this week. “Now if you come to early access with an unfinished game you’ll get crushed…’I paid you 50 euros and you give me an unfinished game?’ The expectations are not the same at all.”
Endless Space, the studio’s debut 4x sci-fi strategy game, was one of the first to utilize the now-popular model for working in tandem with fans to finish a game’s development. The Amplitude CEO said that at that time, it was common for players and press to stay away from something that was still in Early Access. Now it’s the opposite. The Early Access launch is treated as the big release day while the 1.0 launch is considered just another major update.
Endless Legend 2 got off to a good start a year ago, but also fell a bit into that modern Early Access trap of some players coming in expecting a more complete experience and other longtime fans hanging back upon hearing how unfinished the game may have initially felt. Even now, some players on Steam are skeptical of the September 17 1.0 launch date. While the strategy game has strong worldbuilding and a clear identity, there are concerns about clunky UI and a lack of content.
“Originally, I was still seeing it as we could try things, and trying things means you’re allowed to make mistakes because if you want to be creative you have to try things and sometimes it will work, but sometimes it will not work,” de Waubert de Genlis said of Endless Space 2‘s Early Access journey. “You learn from that and you improve and in the end you have something solid but the path could be a bit rocky, or else you have no risk and and you have something flat. So it is tricky.”
It seems like the team’s time and energy across dozens of patches and major updates was spent more on trying to respond to player complaints than on performing grand experiments to help determine what the game might still become. “People can be a bit unforgiving if in one of these updates something is not perfect,” he told Rock Paper Shotgun. “It’s like, ‘Guys, we’re trying something. We’re working on it.’”